Product Stewardship

Developing products and packaging with minimal environmental life cycle impact

At Thermo Fisher Scientific, we strive to develop and deliver innovative and environmentally responsible products to our customers.

Principles of product stewardship guide our “rethinking” on how to minimize the environmental impact of Life Technologies™ products—throughout their life cycle.

We look to move away from a linear manufacturing model in favor of a more resource-efficient, closed-loop system. We consider not only what we take and how we make, but also what happens to Life Technologies™ products when they reach the end of their useful life.

We’re continually looking for ways to create environmentally responsible products for our customers. We want to make products that use fewer toxic materials as inputs and generate less hazardous waste, and instruments with less plastic and more recyclable content.

Our goal is to manufacture products with eco-efficiency in mind. As we make products, we strive to use the least amount of energy possible, to find ways to reduce water usage in both product and process, and to pay attention to the resource intensity of every facility—whether it’s water for landscaping, or lighting retrofits for our warehouses.

Packaging is a primary focus for us. We want our products to survive transportation, and our packaging to be so efficient that we can increase freight density and use less fuel per truckload. When we get it right, we lower costs, lower our carbon intensity, and, at the same time, delight our customers because they have less trash to throw away.

We’re partnering with our customers to help them green their own labs and improve the efficiency of their operations. We believe it’s our responsibility to provide our customers with sustainable product options that are less hazardous, more energy-efficient, create less waste, use sustainable packaging, and can be disposed of sustainably.

Zero waste, to us, also means zero landfill. We don’t want our instruments to end up in the landfill, and we also don’t want them to sit idle at a customer’s site, taking up valuable lab real estate. Bringing used instruments back to be refurbished, as part of our Rapid Exchange Program, means we can harvest high-value parts and responsibly recycle what remains.